What’s going on here!

What exactly is science fiction? We all know what the purists say: many of the greatest and most entertaining science fiction films ever made simply do not qualify.

Okay, so the science is lousy or non-existent. The situations are absurd. Nearly human robots shouldn't be making mechanical clunking and grinding noises when they think and spaceships shouldn't scream and whine in a vacuum. Two guys can't design a rocket for the moon and that mad scientist obviously doesn't know the basics of modern biology!

But we all know they're fun.

And in the end, isn't that what matters?

So grab the popcorn, settle back in the big, comfy easy chair and enjoy. After all, it has to be good...

But, Wait! There Will Be More!

Month: July 2016

Back in 1947, Robert Montgomery directed his version of the Phillip Marlowe story, The Lady in the Lake, using a point of view camera to stand in for Marlowe (he plays the detective in the few shots where his face is visible). It’s an interesting experiment, but not a classic. It’s an intriguing gimmick at first, […]

Some years ago, I published an essay at the late and much lamented Internet Review of Science Fiction listing a number of films which desperately needed to be released on DVD. It included an intriguing German film by bad boy director Rainer Werner Fassbinder (who made more than 40 films before his death at age 35) World […]

The “Uncanny Valley” (which gets referenced briefly in Uncanny) is the theory that when, say, a robot or AI program becomes too realistic – but not quite perfectly human – that people tend to find it disturbing, even creepy. And Uncanny brings in a lot of that creepiness in a deceptively simple three-player drama about a […]

The real puzzle about this one is why so many critics seemed to like it. Back in the 80s, Steve Glenn, an annoying slacker, decided to take a trip out West while filming what was meant to be a post-apocalyptic movie in the vein of Mad Max. So he grabbed his unwilling girlfriend, a VHS […]

Well, it isn’t completely familiar. We’ve seen an awful lot of Young Adult novel series getting turned into SF movies lately, and it is rather nice to see one which doesn’t have children forced to fight each other… Ooops, we’ve got that. Mostly. We do, however have a special effects heavy apocalypse, with aliens launching four […]

Supposedly, Dino De Laurentiis decided to make a ripoff of his own undersea mutation thriller, Leviathan, and hired a new writer to rework Colin Wilson’s original story into a new script. It isn’t too hard to believe when one remembers some of the other stories about Dino – like buying out Alejandro Jodorowsky’s failed version of Dune to give his […]

The main reason any one remembers this one is that John McNaughton, who directed Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, chose to make this often comic horror film next. Henry is often hailed as a great masterpiece. It is also seen as an exploitative piece of trash. The Borrower really isn’t that memorable an entry into the “alien on the […]